Uffizi: A Painting, A Bombing, A Restoration

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh, Tracy, I just got back from Italy. I know you did. You seem so happy while you were there. I didn't want to I didn't want to leave. It was a pretty great trip. And while I did actually bring materials to work on an episode while I was traveling, because you know, long flights and stuff, I got sidetracked by something else because I saw something while I was in Italy that kind of shifted all my gears and I got really obsessed with it. So since that was the only thing I could think about, it became an episode. So for setup, if you visit the Ufeci Museum in Florence, Italy, and if you follow the museum's suggested path, which in and of itself is an adventure, there is this moment where you turn a corner into a staircase, and and in the sort of transitional vaulted ceiling that's over the staircase, just as you're entering it, there is a discolored imprint of a window like it almost looks like somebody like drew a window on the staircase. But then to the right of that staircase, on the wall, there is a small plaque and the English version of it reads, the vault bears the mark of a window blown by the force of the Mafia bomb on May twenty seventh, nineteen ninety three. So I was instantly riveted and I looked it up. I had a vague recollection of this event from when it happened, but I didn't remember a whole lot of the details around it, and I was not aware that the UFITZI is continually incorporating that story into its own story and the way it presents art. So I was on this long journey. It was quite delicious, and that became this episode. We are gonna kind of have this in three parts. We're gonna start by talking about a particular artist and his work, and then we are going to talk about the context of that bombing, and then the work that's been done, some of it pretty recently, to recover from that attack and memorialize the tragedy and pieced together a little bit of lost history. So we are going to start with Bartolomeo Manfredi Bartolomeo Manfredi was born August twenty fifth, fifteen eighty two, in Ostiano, Italy. That's in the province of Cremona, in the Lombardi region. It's adjacent to the Mantua province, and sometimes you will find his place of birth listed as Manchua. We don't know a whole lot more about his early life than that he is said to have become an apprentice or a student to the Mannerist painter Christoforo Roncalli, also known as Pomarancho when he was a boy. Pomarancho lived and worked in Rome and had been chosen to create some of the decoration for Saint Peter's Basilica. This also is a fragmentary piece of information. Writing in nineteen eighty seven for the Burlington magazine, Raphaela Marcelli noted that Pomaracio was in Mantua in fifteen ninety five. He was actually imprisoned there briefly, and that might have been where he came into contact with Bartolomeo, who would have been thirteen. It is unclear if Manfredi ever studied with Caravaggio, although he certainly became associated with the older artist's work. In sixteen oh three, Caravaggio was sued for libel by rival painter Giovanni Baglione after critical and unflattering poems that Caravaggio wrote about Baglione had circulated throughout Rome. I had originally been planning to include some of these poems or an excerpt from them in their translation. But they are so filthy that they made even me, a person very comfortable with salty and filthy language that many other people would find upsetting. I gasped aloud. I was like, oh my goodness, Like my husband ran down the stairs to see if I was okay. They're filthy. But the important thing is that during this libel trial a servant of Caravaggio's is mentioned as actually being the one who passed out the copies of those poems, and that servant is named in the record as Bartolomeo Christifori. So this has led to some speculation, and I think a pretty well grounded idea that this is actually a reference to Bartolomeo Manfredi, and it is using the first name of his teacher, Pamaranchio as his last name. But again, this is still a detail that's very much about piecing together clues rather than something we can say with certainty. Even if Bartolomeo did study with Caravaggio, it could not have been for very long because the renowned painter famously had to leave Rome in sixteen oh six am in murder accusations after a brawl that left Branuccio Tomasoni dead. The actual cause of that brawl is still debated. There are some different versions of it you may hear, but Caravaggio was found guilty and he was sentenced to death in absentia. He died in the Tuscany town of Porto Ercole while he was actually headed back to Rome, apparently in search of a pardon from Naples, where he had been living, and that happened in sixteen ten. Bertolomeo Manfreddi is often described as a Caravaggio follower, which sort of straddles the fence on the issue of whether he was his student, and he became the most well known among the Caravaggisti, that's the painters that emulated both the style and the techniques of Caravaggio. Manfreddi was so studied at the style of Caravaggio that there have been numerous times that his work has been mistaken for Carravaggio's. I definitely when Holly sent me this outline and I googled to see what some of this art looked like. There were a couple of things that immediately made me go, oh, that looks like Caravaggio. One such example is a painting known as Cupid Chastised. This is an image of the naked adolescent Cupid being whipped by Mars, god of war Venus. Cupid's mother is attempting to intercede and to stop Mars, so this is a violent image with a dramatic visual contrast due to the light source being depicted exclusively from the left side of the painting. According to Alfred Moir, writing for the Art Institute of Chicago in nineteen eighty five, when Cupid Chastised first hit the radar of the wider art world outside of Italy, it was in nineteen thirty seven, and at that point it was touted as a Caravaggio that had been newly discovered, and although art experts quickly determined that it was in fact the work of Manfredi, that incorrect Carava attribution continued to circulate, people kept saying it was by him. Today, the provenance of the work, which is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, is clearly laid out. From the time the painting was commissioned in March of sixteen thirteen. That more detailed account of the painting's history became possible, in part due to the discovery of two inventory lists that were in the Vatican Archives that mentioned the painting. They weren't part of the Vatican collection, they were just pieces the archives had that were collections of other people in Rome. That information in those lists was then cross referenced with other contemporary mentions of the painting in order to create this reliable timeline. By sixteen thirteen, when that painting was commissioned, Manfredy was well established. He was clearly influenced by the work of Caravaggio, but he doesn't appear to have been at all like him. In temperament. He was quiet. He didn't socialize very much much. He took mainly private commissions instead of seeking out important public jobs. Painting mostly multi character tableau. Some of his work is religious and subject A lot of it is often referred to as low life, meaning everyday people doing things like drinking in taverns, playing cards, or making music. One such work as the painting The Card Players, sometimes also called Soldiers playing Cards, which Manfreddi completed sometime between sixteen sixteen and sixteen eighteen. In this image, a group of men are at a table in a variety of positions. Some are sitting, some are standing, one is sitting on the edge of the table. They are betting on a card game called Sorrow, which was popular at the end of the sixteenth century. This painting employs the technique known as cherasciro, that's the creation of depth and drama through a contrast of light and dark, with those elements being light and dark within the composition. This painting will become a central character later on in this episode. Manfredi died quite young. He was only forty when he passed. We don't have a lot of information about his death other than the date, which was December twelfth, sixteen twenty two. In Rome. Coming up, we are going to shift our focus to the bombing that took place in Florence in nineteen ninety three. First, though, we will pause for a sponsor break at one four am on May twenty seventh, nineteen ninety three, the city of Florence was rocked by a massive explosion on Via de Giorgophili. That's a street that runs mostly north away from the Arno River, right next to the Offizi gallery complex. On that side of the complex, in addition to gallery buildings, are the Giorgophilia Academy, which is a history educational institution. It's housed records and study of agriculture, forestry and economy, and the Torre de Puchi, a fourteenth century tower that is used by the Georgophilia Academy for both offices and residences. A lot of residents of the city came out of their homes to see what had happened, and they saw a terrifying devastation. The academy and the tower were both badly damaged, as were sections of the art galleries. A theory spread that a gas tank may have exploded, but as first responders got to the scene, they found the epicenter. There was a massive crater in Via de Giorgophili, and they realized that the cause of this was not a gas explosion but a car bomb. A Fiat van filled with an estimated five hundred pounds of explosives had been parked on the street and then left to detonate. That number was initially reported as roughly two hundred pounds, but that was revised upward over the years based on the intensity of the explosion. While the nighttime museum staff had not been on the side of the gallery that faced this street, there were people in the Torre del Pucci. Five people were tragically killed. One was a student named Dario Capolichio, who died in a fire that started after the bombing, and the remaining four were a family who were buried in the collapsed tower. Angela Ninchoni was the caretaker of the tower and her husband, Fabrizio Ninchoni, and their two very young daughters, Nadia and Katerina lived there as well, and the whole family was killed. The museum damage was extensive. In addition to the building itself, the Vasari Corridor was badly damaged. It was one of the most damage pieces of architecture. So that structure is a seven hundred and fifty meter long elevated enclosed walkway and it was built in fifteen sixty five by Giorgio Vasari. So that members of the Medici family could travel from Palazzo Pitti to Pala so Vecchio on the other side of the Arno River, crossing alongside the bridge known as Ponte Vecchio. This provided the Medicis a way to make that crossing without having to deal with commoners or without compromising their safety. The Villa Lambartesca, the street that runs perpendicular to the Via de Giorgofili, was covered in rubble. There was a lot of damage to works of art. A handful of their most famous pieces had a bulletproof glass covering that protect them from projectile debris, but the vast majority did not. An estimated one quarter of the Ufizi collection was affected. According to the website, the final count was one hundred and seventy three paintings and fifty six sculptures in various states of damage and destruction. In addition to that, because the building had so much damage, a lot of works had to be quickly moved to other parts of the facility. Leaving them where they were would have exposed them to the elements. The unharmed room where Bonticelli's Venus and Primavera are housed, became the de facto landing place for a lot of the art that needed to be moved. That led reporters to note that it became the most impressive room of art in the world. The museum staff and investigators took photos to document everything. You can see a lot of those photos online at the Fizzi website as well. Mad page will also be linked from our show notes. At the time, there were three paintings that were considered to be permanent losses, Adoration of the Shepherds by Gerardo del NotI and two by Bartolomeo Menfredi. They were the Concert and the card Players. So just like the corridor, Vasari also designed the main Ufizi building. That name actually just means offices because it was built to house the various governmental divisions that were operating under Cosumo, the first to Medici. Cosumo tapped Giorgio Vasari to design this building in fifteen sixty, but Vasari died in fifteen seventy four and the building was not yet finished, and at that point Bernardo Bontalenti took up the project early on in the building's existence. Once it had been finished, the top floor of it was used mostly to house the impressive Medichi art collection. They were, as has come up on the show many times before, significant patrons of the arts, and they commissioned a lot of paintings and sculptures that are very famous today. Over time, the Medici art collection grew and it took up more space, and really that became the sole purpose of the Ufizi was to house that collection. Anna Maria Luisa de Medici born in sixteen ninety one, became the last of the Medici line, and in a very famous and important move, she signed what was known as the Family Packed and that basically left the Ufizi Museum to the government of Tuscany, and it provided for the entire art collection to remain in Offizi in perpetuity and to be made open to the public. So she basically made it into a public museum. This cemented the reputation of Florence as a nexus of great art, and it was also something that was designed to draw visitors to the city and keep its economy strong. So the damage that the Afezi sustained in nineteen ninety three was something that the entire city felt very deeply, because that museum is a work of art in and of itself like the building is considered a work of art, and it is also the heart of the culture and the identity of Florence. Michael Kemmelman of The New York Times traveled to Florence to report on the situation several weeks after the fact, and his description was printed in papers around the world. One section describes a gallery that looked over the street where the car had been parked, and then reads quote through that enormous opening in the wall, the view is breathtaking and horrific. Set against the backdrop of the soft Tuscan hills and the great dome that Bruneliski designed for the cataedl are the shattered red tile roofs of the buildings across the street from the Ufizi, and the crumbled shell of an ancient tower in which a family killed in the explosion used to live. A few household belongings can still be seen on what remains of the tower's top floor, reduced to barely more than a roofless platform. Historical agricultural archives housed in the tower were destroyed. Initially, there was no real sense of who the perpetrator or perpetrators might be, why they may have targeted the museum, and even if the museum was the actual target, the Ufizi is a squared off U shaped building with a courtyard, so if someone really wanted to damage it, that courtyard would have been the optimal place to park the explosives, but the car bomb was parked on the exterior part of the U. The incident sparked both rumors and outrage. The day after the bombing, labor unions in Florence called a four hour strike, during which more than twenty thousand people took to the streets in a demonstration to send the message that the city was united against violence and intimidation. There were suspicions about the perpetrator being part of organized crime, or even an inside job initiated by corrupt government officials. Quote. People might seem calm, but they're angry. This is not crime, It is politics. There is a war between people who want change and people who don't want to lose power, and the only way is to throw bombs and frighten people away from change. The prevailing theory from early on among investigators was that the mafia was involved. Just a few weeks earlier, there had been an attack in Rome against television talk show host Marizio Costanzo after he aired anti mafia pieces on his show. The journalists survived that attack thanks to lucky timing, but twenty three people were injured, including his driver, and an estimated one hundred families lost their homes in that blast. But the most important details of the Rome bombing in terms of how it related to the Safizi situation were that the explosive used in that bomb in Rome were the same as the ones used in Florence, and they had been packed into a Fiat van just like the vehicle outside the Afizi. The motive for the attack on the Aufizi was retaliation. In the months and weeks leading up to the explosion, Italian authorities had initiated a huge crackdown on mafia activity and had arrested hundreds of people in the process, including some very high ranking members of the criminal organization. Many of those men were made examples of authorities put them in solitary confinement to show that they could cut them off from the power structures that they depended on, and in response, the crime syndicate sent the message that it could strike at Italy's art and history, things that could not be replaced, that is, of itself horrific, but could also recap the Italian economy, which really depends on the tourism money that museums and historical architecture generate. It took a year for authorities to conclusively tie the mafia to the bomb, and finally, in nineteen ninety eight, several high ranking bosses within the organization were sentenced to life in prison for it. Stepping away from the horrific bombing, Eufizi was having some trouble already in the months before the blast, for reasons that did not have to do with the criminal underworld. In March nineteen ninety three, an article from Reuters ran under the title push comes to shove at Italy's Ufizi. Too many visitors, too little staff at famed museum, and that write up reported that the museum had become so popular without the support to run it that quote. On average, a third of the gallery's rooms are closed during the tourist season because of a chronic staff shortage that famous works like those of Bonicelli, the things that were drawing people to the museum, were often off limits because that room like others was closed to manage crowdflow because no one was available to just keep an eye on the art. This was an issue that government officials were, according to the article, frustrated by Antonio Palucci, who was the municipal supervisor over Florence's museums at the time, gave a statement to journalist John Fullane that evidenced his frustration at the way people had to elbow one another just to get a look at the art. Quote, the pushing and shoving and the galleries is a barbarity. Visiting a museum today has become a strain for museum guards and directors. It's like trying to hold a trench with fewer and fewer soldiers in the face of an ever bigger offensive. The museum had reached a point where it would sometimes borrow guards from other museums to try to keep up with demand, but that meant that those other museums often had too. There were proposals in discussion to ban school groups as one way to try to mitigate this problem. The head of the UFIZI at the time, Anna Maria petriol Tofani, told the press that the problem stemmed from the fact that while bureaucrats in Rome were happy to accept the income that the Ufitzi generated. They micro managed every move the museum tried to make to improve the visitor experience and ensure proper running and upkeep of the facility, and they were not approving any kind of spending. So at the time, the UFIZI was estimated to generate about five point five million dollars in income each year, and yet they were only allowed seven curators for their massive and historically significant collection. Other branches of their staff were similarly disproportionately small for what they were trying to do. The allocated budget for its upkeep was tight enough that, according to newspaper reports, staff had to buy their own stamps and office supplies. In the years just before the attack, the museum proposed a fifty million dollar project that would expand the museum's space by taking over a handful of State Archives offices in the building that had been empty for five years after the operations in those offices moved to Rome. The government approved it, but then insisted on hiring their own contractors for the renovation. Those contractors were not familiar with working on historic buildings and caused damage by injecting cement into the foundation and that resulted in cracking. This project stalled. After that, we are going to talk about how the Ufitzi recovered from the blast and how that recovery has stretched into the very recent past. After we hear from the sponsors to keep stuff you missed in history class going. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the Ufizi was incredible quick to form a plan of action for recovery. Curators and other museum staff started clean up the same day as the blast, mobilizing quickly to protect the art and to assess the damage. In cases where canvases and sculptures had been shredded by glass and other debris, staff members carefully crawled the floors of the galleries to collect every possible piece. They matched them to their frames and what was left of the original art, and then they stored them all together for possible reconstruction. This meant that they were literally pawing through rubble to identify what debris was from a painting versus a sculpture versus possibly a piece of the building, and there was broken glass everywhere, so this was an act of dedication. As they worked, they sorted those collected pieces into wooden trays to try to keep the various works of art separated. It is really hard to imagine how much determination and teamwork it took to clean up the museum and reopen it, but he was incredibly organized in this effort, and other museums in the city also helped. While the Yufitzi was closed, some of the other museums extended their hours so that tourists would still have access to the city's art. Twenty days after the bombing, less than three weeks, the museum was partially reopened. A lot of the paintings from the damaged part of the building were rotated into the reopened galleries so that people could still see them, and then the remaining galleries were restored and reopened over the course of the next four years. Because of the need for the museum to rebuild, the logistical problems of space it had faced before the tragedy were able to be addressed in the aftermath of the bombing. The response to the tragedy was so impressive that it became a model for how museum recovery should be managed. Yeah, I feel like that could be its own whole topic. There have been papers written about how they handled it and how every other museum should study how they handled it because they're bias for action was so great while also maintaining an incredibly high level of care. It's quite cool. In the years immediately following the attack, Menfrate's painting the Concert was restored as much as possible. It had been shredded into fragments, but the recovered fragments were big enough that restorers were able to piece what they had together, although it is not a complete picture. Then, in two thousand and three, Gerardo de la Natti's Adoration of the Shepherds was also restored, but the card Players remained as the one piece that was believed to be beyond repair. It was so damaged that it actually remained untouched for decades. In the days and weeks following the explosion, the museum staff had carefully taken what was left of it, which was just hundreds of tiny, fragmented pieces, and covered it with rice paper to protect it. Those pieces were placed in an envelope that was stored along with the original canvass and frame of the work. That particular painting had not actually been in the Ufizi for terribly long when the bombing happened. It had been in Palazzo Peti in a storeroom until nineteen sixty nine, when it went through a restoration, and then it was added to the Caravagesque collection on display at the Eufitzi. Fast forward to twenty fourteen, when Danielle Lippy happened across the fragments of the card Players. She had studied painting restorations, starting all the way back when she was nineteen, and from there she had started working with Superintendenza that means superintendency, which is an office within Italy's Ministry of Culture that focuses on conservation and protection of important works. She described the moment when she saw the card Players this way in twenty twenty three in an interview quote, I was at the gallery's storage rooms for an inspection when I came across the work, in what was left of it. The work bailed on the frame had been placed in the entrance hall, and on the table lay the envelope containing all the paintings spranggments collected from the floor. Among them, the fragment with the playing cards stood out somehow, The identifying element of the represented subject had survived, but the fragments of painted canvas would become dust if left in that envelope. I thought that through my work I could contribute in a small way to saving a record of that dramatic event. Lippi put together a detailed proposal describing her plan to at least partially restore the badly damaged painting, and she got approval. But then the next hurdle was money. In June twenty seventeen, the UFIZI, along with partners from the Florence community, launched a fundraiser for the project, which was called Culture against Terror through Crowdfunding and more than twenty six thousand euros were raised, so at that point the financials were in place and then began the actual work. So keep in mind the six hundred and fifteen pieces that Leapy and her team had to work with were tiny, some of them just a centimeter or two in width and height. So she was tasked with a very precious jigsaw puzzle where all of the pieces were so damaged and you could not try to match them edge to edge to find their locations. She needed a good visual reference to try to match the colors and the shadings of the fragments too. The Ufitzi Archive had photographs of it that had been taken after the nineteen sixty nine to nineteen seventy restoration, but those were in black and white. But then Leby started searching the Scala archives. This is a Florentine archive dating back to nineteen fifty three that collects images of cultural history, including art, and then creates very high quality digital versions that can be licensed, so sort of like Getty Images, but for art and film. And they had a high resolution photograph of the card players from nineteen eighty eight, so five years before the attack and well after the prior restoration. Scala donated this image to the project, and the resulting project is this really cool marriage of technology and art because each tiny piece was scanned and then the image of the original painting was projected onto the canvas to enable the restorers to visualize placement and kind of match up pieces to their positions. Keep in mind, this painting was in the style of Caravaggio, which meant that a lot of these recovered pieces were just incredibly dark shades of brown and plums verging on black. So discerning which tiny fragment was gonna fit where required incredible concentration and care. As Leape and her fellow restoration experts started carefully comparing what they had in hand to that high resolution photo, they realized that not all of the pieces were going to be usable. Even with all six hundred and fifteen pieces, this would have been a partial restoration, but some of those fragments were so small or so damaged that they could not be reincorporated into the piece. In the end, almost two hundred pieces were deemed unusable. Each of the usable fragments had to be very carefully cleaned. They were painstakingly stitched together and affixed to a new backing canvas with special adhesive. The ones that could not be used were affixed to panels that are placed in a custom folder on the back of the painting, so they will be available for future analysis. In the end, right around thirty percent of the original painting has been pieced back together. It's both beautiful and heartbreaking to see the vast blank areas in this frame. In a twenty twenty three interview with Scala Archives, Leap you stated, quote the work thus recovered is not brought back to an intact state, but has become a document a memory and warning of that terrible affront. If you were watching this on our Netflix channel and you're wondering, why are you not showing us what this looks like? It is that artwork that is part of Italy's cultural heritage has special protections through the Italian government. So you can use pictures of these works for like personal use, but not for something like what we are doing where we are putting a show on Netflix. But you can see them on the Ufizzi's website. Yeah, if you do an Internet search for Ufizi Manfredi, it's gonna come up like I did that right before we recorded, and three of the top five results were images of this restored painting. It's a very famous effort. When the partially restored painting was set to make its debut in twenty eighteen, the Ufizi's director Iika Schmidt told The New York Times that this whole project was really about much more than art. Quote for Florence, Italy in the world, it was such an important event of terror. We can't bring back to life the people left dead or the heavily damaged paintings, but we can build a memori for culture against violence and terror. In addition to the Manfredie painting. When this debut happened, the museum also showed a documentary in the gallery that showed the work that Leapy's team had done, and it also included interviews with rescue workers who had been on the scene following the blast in nineteen ninety three. Since then, the partially restored the card players as well as the concert, have been displayed on subsequent years as temporary exhibits marking the anniversary of the bombing. Yeah, I'm not clear whether they do it every year. One thing that I read while I was in Florence made it sound like this is an annual thing they do now, But I couldn't find any clear evidence where they were like now and you know, twenty twenty, and I don't know what happened during like the really harsh period of the pandemic where they were they had just shut down and weren't doing it or not. So probably they're you know, I'm sure they will show it again and again. It's so cool. I have a listener mail that's also kind of about art. Yeah, it's about greeting cards all good, which I was delighted that people enjoyed our weird greeting card episode because that's one of those ones that I was like, I'm into this. I don't know if anybody else, but this is an email from our listener Kelsey, who writes, hello, ladies. I've been listening to the show for many years through many hosts. I started when I got my first iPod Nano, when I was in college around two thousand and eight. I love your banter and hearing about your crafty pursuits. The recent podcast about greeting cards was particularly interesting. Over last summer, I got into watercolor painting through a project where I illustrated a short story I wrote. I'm working on self publishing it on Amazon. Since then, i've been painting cards. They're a great small unit of art. As a teacher, I'm tired after work. Thank you for being an educator, and then Kelsey mentions the plan to get back into crochet when there's more time available over summer, and conclude, thank you for your hard work. I love this email one because I always want to thank all of our teachers because they deserve it, and especially in this episode where we talked about museum staff needed to buy supplies. I'm like just like teachers was how I felt when I was doing the research. But also I also have gotten into water color painting recently in the last year. When I was in Japan last year, my best friend is an artist. She's also who I went to Italy with, and there was this one art supply store in Japan she wanted to go to and we went, and I, on a whim bought art supplies. I bought watercolor sets. I had not watercolor painted since I was a kid, and that wasn't real watercolor, that's just goofing off. But these sets were so beautiful that I was entranced and I was like, must buy. And then earlier this year I was like, I'm going to start using these a little bit, and so I've been doing my own little self directed watercolor study for the same reasons Kelsey mentions, you can spend fifteen twenty minutes and produce something kind of cute. And also I've been using it in fabric design. Oh nice. We all do a watercolor and then scan it in and incorporated into a fabric print. So I love. I want everybody to make art in whatever way makes sense to them, because I honestly think it is some of the best therapy you can do outside of actually having a therapist. I just think it's good for your soul to make things. It makes your brain work in a new way that we're not given the opportunity to do all the time, where you're just kind of playing low stakes. Art is the best for your mind in my opinion. Anyway, that's just me proselytizing that I want everybody to please make art in whatever way they like, because I think it's really good for your soul. Kelsey, thank you so much for this email, because you made me delighted and gave me an excuse to talk about the importance of art. There are also photographs of some of the art that Kelsey's still and one says be a good plant, water yourself, and I just think that's charming as heck. And is a painting of a sunflower, which I also love. And then there is another that has some beautiful colored dragonflies in it, and another that I am not one hundred percent commonent. I believe it is a lion and that its main is the rainbow. Yeah, I think it's a lion with the rainbow main and not My first thought was is this a kitty that is just surrounded by a halo, like a kitty kitty, not like a lion. A little lions are kitties anyway, These are very beautiful. Thank you for sharing your art with us. I love art. There's no surprise there, uh, but I'm always delighted when people share their work with us. So that's another thing. If you don't want to do pet tacks, you can share your art. It's great. You can send us whatever you want. If you want to do that, you can do that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. If you would like to check out our source lists and our show notes, which we've mentioned a couple times in this episode, you can do that at mistinhistory dot com. If you would like to subscribe to the podcast and you haven't done that yet, you can do that on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,